SMALL WORLD

11.22.11

Most Facebook Users Closely Linked

Frazer Harrison / Getty Images

Don’t think you’re hiding behind those privacy settings: almost everybody on Facebook is connected to you somehow. According to a new study by Facebook and the University of Milan, Facebook users’ degrees of separation from each other is even fewer than Kevin Bacon’s: the average number of steps it takes to connect any two Facebook users is 4.74. Ninety-nine percent are connected by five or six “hops,” and 92 percent can be connected in four or fewer. The researchers said that when looking at single countries, the average number of hops decreased to less than three.